More than seven decades after the founding of Israel, the momentum to establish a Jewish state has led to remarkable achievements in the nation's “hardware”: stable structures in government, the military, and the economy. At the same time, the “operating system,” the guidelines that accommodate human diversity and enable coexistence, is still riddled with weaknesses. Arye Carmon diagnoses the critical vulnerabilities at the heart of Israeli democracy and the obstacles to forming a sustainable national consciousness. The author merges touching narratives about his own life in Israel with insightful ruminations on the Jewish diaspora and the arc of Israel's history, illuminating the conflicts between Jewish identities and between democratic values and the halacha—the collective body of Jewish religious laws.There is no consensus on the characteristics that define Israel as a state that is both Jewish and democratic. Rather, the struggle between a secular and a religious Jewish identity, amid voices promoting ethnocentric nationalism, threatens to sever the ties that strengthen democracy.This cultural fragility has far-reaching implications for Israeli institutions and deepens societal rifts. Israel lacks a constitution to bind its democracy and a bill of rights to safeguard the freedoms of its citizens, enable the inclusion of diverse outlooks and beliefs, and underpin the norms of its civil society.

Paradigms and Sand Castles demonstrates the relationship between thoughtful research design and the collection of persuasive evidence in support of theory. It teaches the craft of research through interesting and carefully selected examples from the field of comparative development studies. Barbara Geddes is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Examining 36 democracies from 1945 to 2010, this text arrives at conclusions about what type of democracy works best. It demonstrates that consensual systems stimulate economic growth, control inflation and unemployment, and limit budget deficits.

What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.

Salt in the Sand is a compelling historical ethnography of the interplay between memory and state violence in the formation of the Chilean nation-state. The historian and anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier focuses on northern Chile, which figures prominently in the nation’s history as a site of military glory during the period of national conquest, of labor strikes and massacres in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, and of state detention and violence during World War II and the Cold War. It was also the site of a mass-grave excavation that galvanized the national human rights movement in 1990, during Chile’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Frazier analyzes the creation of official and alternative memories of specific instances of state violence in northern Chile from 1890 to the present, tracing how the form and content of those memories changed over time. In so doing, she shows how memory works to create political subjectivities mobilized for specific political projects within what she argues is the always-ongoing process of nation-state formation. Frazier’s broad historical perspective on political culture challenges the conventional periodization of modern Chilean history, particularly the idea that the 1973 military coup marked a radical break with the past. Analyzing multiple memories of state violence, Frazier innovatively shapes social and cultural theory to interpret a range of sources, including local and national government archives, personal papers, popular literature and music, interviews, architectural and ceremonial commemorations, and her ethnographic observations of civic associations, women's and environmental groups, and human rights organizations. A masterful integration of extensive empirical research with sophisticated theoretical analysis, Salt in the Sand is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on human rights, democratization, state formation, and national trauma and reconciliation.

Employing analytical tools borrowed from game theory, Carles Boix offers a complete theory of political transitions, in which political regimes ultimately hinge on the nature of economic assets, their distribution among individuals, and the balance of power among different social groups. Backed up by detailed historical work and extensive statistical analysis that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, this book explains, among many other things, why democracy emerged in classical Athens. It also discusses the early triumph of democracy in both nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America and the failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.

The book summarises the critique of these approaches, suggests a comprehensive alternative framework, and shows how the alternative works in reality through a case study of the largest of the new democracies, Indonesia.

Given the weaknesses of mainstream democratisation since the 1980s, the authors present a cutting edge examination of dynamics of political change in the direction of more substantive democracy. While focusing on the Global South, they also draw comparisons from historical and contemporary experiences from Scandinavia.

Comparative constitutional law has a long pedigree, but the comparative study of constitution-making has emerged and taken form only in the last quarter-century. While much of the initial impetus came from the study of the American and French constituent assemblies in the late eighteenth century, this volume exemplifies the large comparative scope of current research. The contributors discuss constituent assemblies in South East Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, Latin America, and in Nordic countries. Among the new insights they provide is a better understanding of how constituent assemblies may fail, either by not producing a document at all or by adopting a constitution that fails to serve as a neutral framework for ordinary politics. In a theoretical afterword, Jon Elster, an inspirational thinker on the current topic, offers an analysis of the micro-foundations of constitution-making, with special emphasis on the role of crises-generated passions.

The days of "revolutionary" campaign strategies are gone. The extraordinary has become ordinary, and campaigns at all levels, from the federal to the municipal, have realized the necessity of incorporating digital media technologies into their communications strategies. Still, little is understood about how these practices have been taken up and routinized on a wide scale, or the ways in which the use of these technologies is tied to new norms and understandings of political participation and citizenship in the digital age. The vocabulary that we do possess for speaking about what counts as citizenship in a digital age is limited. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a federal-level election, interviews with communications and digital media consultants, and textual analysis of campaign materials, this book traces the emergence and solidification of campaign strategies that reflect what it means to be a citizen in the digital era. It identifies shifting norms and emerging trends to build new theories of citizenship in contemporary democracy. Baldwin-Philippi argues that these campaign practices foster engaged and skeptical citizens. But, rather than assess the quality or level of participation and citizenship due to the use of technologies, this book delves into the way that digital strategies depict what "good" citizenship ought to be and the goals and values behind the tactics.